- Allen Baron's Blast of Silence features one of the greatest hard-boiled openings of all time. The screen is black except for a small light at the end of a tunnel. The gravel-voiced narrator (Lionel Stander) starts in with what sounds like Raymond Chandler updated for the beat generation with "Remembering out of the black silence, you were born in pain." The remembered event is the birth of "Baby Boy" Frankie Bono (Baron), which we immediately discover caused his mother's death. "Father doing well," the narrator wryly notes. As the light at the end of the tunnel draws near, we see that Frankie is now being reborn into Manhattan as his subway train moves "through tunnels, like sewers, hidden under the city." Frankie's in town to kill a man, because that's Frankie's job.
- The target is a man named Troiano (Peter Clune), whom Frankie infers is a mobster grown too big for his britches. What bothers Frankie about his line of work isn't the killing -- after all, he always invents some reason to hate his targets -- but rather the fact that it forces him to interact with people. First, he has to meet his contact (Charles Creasap) on a ferry boat to get the details. Then he has to visit the repellent rat enthusiast Big Ralph (Larry Tucker) to order a gun. As if things weren't bad enough, Frankie even has the misfortune to run into Petey (Danny Meehan), a fellow grown-up orphan whose sister Lori (Molly McCarthy) would love to see Ralphie at the party they're throwing. Despite the usual warning signals going off in Frankie's head, he relents and has a good time.
- Trouble is, Frankie is out of practice at being human. He can nod along in a conversation and imitate dance moves, but when it comes to real interpersonal connection, he's lost without a map. This causes everyone some real problems when Frankie tries to fall in love with Lori without taking the usual preliminary steps. But at least Frankie can bury himself in his assignment. As he plods past storefronts festooned for Christmas and stands in line for Santa Claus while stalking Troiana, he constantly ruminates on the best approach to killing his prey. As the narrator explains, "You don't have to know a man to live with him, but you have to know a man like a brother to kill him."
- Falling somewhere between the film noir that preceded it, the roughly contemporaneous French New Wave, and the gritty crime flicks of a decade later, Blast of Silence delivers a higher density of plain old nastiness in its meager 77 minutes than most films before or since. Particularly unique is the narrator's use of second-person, transforming what would normally be an internal monologue into an external tormentor who constantly tries to drive Frankie's life down the same set of rails. Equally memorable is the film's extensive use of location filming, which Frankie constantly marches through in practically every direction. Although the closing narration wonders if maybe God is on Frankie's side now that "the scream is dead" and "there's no pain," you wouldn't exactly mistake this movie as having a happy ending. In fact, it features the only possible conclusion that could follow a beginning like that one.
- Apparently Peter Falk was originally offered the role of Frankie for zero pay. What a different movie that would have been.
